Some thoughts infulenced by an interview with Thierry Breton (ATOS CEO) on his Zero Email initiative and idea to ban internal email communications within February 2014.

…the fact that most of the young people that we were hiring were not using email anymore after graduating from universities.

They were instead mainly using instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook – and for most of them, when they joined Atos it was first time they had ever worked with internal email tools like [Microsoft] Outlook.

So this intrigued me – and in addition I had already been thinking for many years that most of my colleagues and my employees were spending increasing amounts of time on internal emails.

Please read the full intewiew, it is really helpful.

As for me as a Gen Y guy, most valuable of it is idea to listen Gen Y folks – we’re the future and it really helps to get an insight. It’s 10 years since I’ve finished school and last week I’ve been there at annual alumni meeting, where my teacher told me how nowadays’ scholars are doing: they use VoIP and public social networks to collaborate and define homework tasks, it’s within their DNA. Even now best of graduates come here and what do they see? A corporate ban on any modern browser, which is #1 web tool for every younger.
So as for me that Zero Email is 1st of all a nice example of listening to younger folks.

I make ~200 km per day; by car or by a corporate bus (which gives an unique opportunity to sleep while travelling with payoff in 2 additional hours of sleeping in the morning).

If using bus, getting to workplace at 8.30 means waking up at 6.00. It’s very early for Moscow) I didn’t ever thought I’ll be waking up so early.

The job is nice. The Mars is nice. The people are nice. The only bad thing is this everyday bus trip though it’s much better when the car is okay: driving, listening to music, watching airplanes taking off in Domodedovo airport, and enjoying the sun.

While adding another TripIt plan I’ve found an application which was developed by Russian startup – it’s called ArrivedOK.

The whole thing is about your relatives’ and friends’ nerves – nowadays plane delays and (OMG!) crashes happen so often that people are nervous about is you landed OK or not (hope that case will never happen).

After registration you simply enter your mobile number; before flying away you enter mobile numbers of people you’d like to inform upon arrival. And… no, that’s not all – you need to pay some fee in advance to buy some ‘packs’ of SMS. But there’s a free version – informing people by tweets or blog posts.